Away day … not as bad as expected

In fact, I would go as far as saying, it was quite enjoyable. Today Friday was a team building day. It was a day when the new team (those who were not off work) got together and began to learn a bit about each other. The day when the restructure of the team started to take shape. That was the aim.

We were supposed to start the day with a two hour slot of ‘bonding and building’, followed by four presentations with Q & A’s and feedback and ending with brief quiz as a ‘bit of fun’.

Two days ago, the new team manager (we shall call her KB) gave us all a person we had to ‘buddy’ and a list of questions that we had answer about ourselves and our buddy. This was the preparation work that we had to complete before the day. It was designed to identify where we lacked self-confidence and to give each of us an idea of what the rest of the team thought of each other. It was only looking at the positives and not the negatives. We were then required, to read out what we had written about ourselves and get feedback from our buddy and the rest of the team.

However, before we started, ‘KB’ had a little ‘exercise’ that she wanted us to do. Basically is was to test of our listening skills, but was more a test of our memory capabilities. In our pairings, one had to talk about something, anything that was of interest or importance to us. This had to last for two minutes and person two was not allowed to make notes or ask questions. Then person two had to relay back to person one, what they had said without being prompted. Then (not much longer now) person one had to feedback how well person two had done. The roles were then reversed and the process repeated. For me it proved to be very difficult, as I am having a few memory issues which I’ve put down to my days in hospital. My buddy, who is actually my new line manager (and we shall call him NM), was almost word perfect with his memory and at the risk of embarrassing the lad, I ensured everyone knew that.

Then we go to the ‘nitty-gritty’ and started the part that I was dreading. The metaphorical exposing of each other. To make matters worse, ‘NM’ and me** were the first to go. To my surprise, I found it quite informative and not as difficult as I feared and I think I got a lot out of it.

Now this part was supposed to take an hour and a half for all twelve of us, and then we would have one of the presentations. This was to be followed by a two ‘bonding’ lunch at a local pub and a further three presentations in the afternoon. What happened was that the ‘bonding and building’ sessions went on longer than ‘KB’ anticipated, and at 16:30 she decided that the four presentations would now happen on a later day. I don’t think anyone expected or intended it to go on for so long.

All in all, it was a quite informative (if a bit tiring) day and at the end, I think we were all glad it was over. But maybe next time, I won’t be as apprehensive. Who knows?

** for all you grammar types, should this be “NB and I” or am I correct with “NB and me”??